


If This Is Tradition (Then Sign Me Up)

by ms_soma



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bored Sherlock, Fluff, M/M, Remix Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 08:09:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1811380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ms_soma/pseuds/ms_soma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is New Year's Day and Sherlock is bored. John is stubbornly ignoring Sherlock's need for entertainment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If This Is Tradition (Then Sign Me Up)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyMerlin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyMerlin/gifts).
  * Inspired by [I would brave a hundred New Years alone (for just one kiss with you)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1112509) by [LadyMerlin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyMerlin/pseuds/LadyMerlin). 



> Written for the [ Sherlock Remix ](http://sherlock-remix.livejournal.com/) challenge, remixing [ I would brave a hundred New Years alone (for just one kiss with you) ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1112509) by [ LadyMerlin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyMerlin/pseuds/LadyMerlin)

**IF THIS IS TRADITION (THEN SIGN ME UP)**

**New Years 2011**

 

It had been six days without a case. Six days of mind-numbing, carol singing, snow falling, murderless boredom. Well, not necessarily murderless; this time of year typically saw a spike in unnatural deaths. But even a half-inebriated Anderson trying to juggle his wife and mistress and which one wanted which perfume would be able to piece the clues together.

Christmas. When forced familial togetherness lead to murder. Humans were so boringly predictable, with their jingle bells and parties and _tradition_ and stabbing of the brother that coveted thy wife.

“Sherlock, do you know what this black film is in the bottom of my mixing bowl?” John called out from the kitchen, interrupting what was shaping up to be a rather satisfying sulk.

“Hmm,” I looked up from the spot I was staring into the floor. Couldn’t have John thinking I was merely waiting for him to provide some entertainment. Had to maintain the illusion that I was thinking something deep, something meaningful.

He cocked his head, his assessing gaze raking over my face. I rather enjoyed it when John switched from his _answer my damned question_ expression to his _I’m a doctor and I will work out what’s bothering you_ face. John. Just as predictable and prone to sentiment as any other human, yet the only one I found incessantly fascinating.

“I know _we_ didn’t make any plans to commemorate Christmas and New Years,” he started. “But even criminals tend to take this time off. You need a new hobby.”

“I have a new hobby.”

The tips of John’s ears went red, as they were wont to do whenever I suggested anything involving us in a state of undress.

“That may be the case, but I’m not going to be manipulated into shagging you just yet.”

“Manipulated?”

“Just yesterday you told me that I had two choices, remember? Cigarettes or sex?”

“Well it is only fair, you’ve taken one of them away.”

John tried not to smile, but the left side of his lip curled up anyway.

“You’ll just have to amuse yourself a bit longer. I’m busy.”

I’ve never had to hide the scowl from my face from John and I wasn’t about to start just because we were now _involved_. Seriously, there was no work, the man had taken away my tobacco, Moriarty had gone surprisingly quiet. The least he could do would be to provide some stimulation!

“Sherlock!” John shouted, again snapping me from my sulk. “I know you hate repetition, but what is this in my bowl?”

I eyed the line of black in the bottom of the glass, casting my mind back to the experiments I’d undertaken since John had used a piece of kitchenware. 

“It’s either tar or licorice.”

John put his nose deep into the bowl and had a sniff.

“What have I told you about using my bowls for roadworks?”

“Please, the day you use those containers for actual cooking will be the day I ask Mycroft for a cushy government job.”

“Well polish up your resume, my love. I am making you pie.”

Pie? This was why I was not currently being snogged senseless on the couch? For food? 

“Contrary to popular belief, the way to my heart is not my stomach,” I reminded him.

“But you’ve never had my Mum’s apple pie. Sponge cake bottom, pie crust top. It’s amazing.”

Well of course I hadn’t ever had the pie. John’s Mum had been dead for years before we had met. Even if by some miraculous occurrence she was able to spring back to life, I doubted that the first thing on her agenda would be to cook me her bloody pie. If anything it would be making sure her son knew the importance of keeping a partner, an epically bored one at that, entertained.

By the time I’d snapped from my reverie, John had flown down the stairs.

First he was making pie, then he was leaving, all the while ignoring me in my hour of need.

“Where are you going?”

“To borrow an uncontaminated dish from Mrs Hudson,” he called.

By the time he’d clambered back upstairs, I was once again horizontal on the couch, trying to defragment the mind palace, because there was nothing else interesting to do. I could hear John opening draws and cupboards, pulling out items, putting others back in. He was always so methodical. Why was he being so dull when I needed him?

“Do we have baking powder?” he called from the kitchen.

“Not anymore. And no, you don’t want to know why, unless you are curious about the disintegration of eyes in a bakery.”

“No,” John cut me off. “No, I really don’t. I’ll just use the baking soda instead.”

I didn’t respond, just retreated back to the mind palace. Cataloguing, linking, moving around. Bored, bored, bored, bored—

“BORED!” I shouted, wishing John’s gun was by my hand to put myself out of my misery. The world was so tedious! The work was never going to pick up, John was never going to give me back my cigarettes, he was going to be in that kitchen making ridiculously boring pies for an eternity until my brain atrophied from disuse.

I looked up to find John leaning against the wall jamb to the kitchen, arms crossed, flour caught on his stubble, staring at me with a startlingly undeserved expression of affection.

“What?” I asked without patience.

“Where did you just go? I’ve been standing here ten minutes.”

“You have not.”

“I have.”

I eyed him curiously. Was this the kind of Christmas miracle others spoke of? Was John choosing me over infernal baked goods? “You’re not baking the pie?”

“It’s done,” he smiled and stalked over. “In the oven. And it has 40 minutes to cook.”

John came and laid over me, untying the sash to my robe and rubbing hand down my torso.

“You didn’t take one ounce of notice of what has gone on in the past half hour, have you?” John continued to rub in a most satisfying way. “So unstimulated that you ignored the world altogether.”

“When the world fails to entertain me, I fail to entertain the world,” I said with a softness matching John’s own tone.

He looked up at me through his lashes, eyes heavy, like every dirty thought that had crossed my mind that morning was now crossing his.

“Can you think of something _not boring_ we can do while we wait?” John whispered into my ear, his breath hot, faint traces of caramelised apple wafting across my cheek. His hand traced down my belly to rest against my crotch.

If John kept up his current ministrations, we would need to find something else to occupy the remaining 35 minutes that the pie would need to cook. I had to do something to prolong it.

“Bedroom,” I said. I had long since calculated the right octave that John’s soldier brain responded to as an order. He got up immediately.

“Mine or yours?”

I took the stairs two at a time. While my bed was the most decadent of the two, John’s was further away from nosy landladies. Not that I cared what Mrs Hudson heard go bump, or groan, or _Oh God, Sherlock_ in the night, but John did. Right now, I had his attention. And I wanted it to stay on me.

The bedroom smelled musty from disuse, but soon all it would smell of was John and me and us together. The thought was heady and exciting, and I had to hold myself back from ripping John’s clothes from his frame and devouring him then and there.

Although it appeared that John would beat me to it. For someone who had ignored my advances all morning, John was frightfully eager now. I’d barely pushed the robe from my shoulders when he was naked on the bed stroking himself. If he thought for even a second that he was going to get away with that, he was sorely mistaken.

Time became a blur. Licking this, kissing that. The touching, the rubbing, the exclamations, the swearing. John had a wonderful mouth in bed, both the way he used it on various parts of my anatomy and the puerile language that came from it. It felt like no time before he had me flipped over and underneath him, then on my back so we could be face to face. 

He nipped and teased and drove me to the edge several times before he consistently hit that spot inside me that made me believe in a higher power. The world went white and there was no criminals, no boredom, no Anderson, no Moriarty. Just a world where only John and I existed. It was luxurious, it was safe, and I could see myself comfortably living there for the duration of a nap, until John shouted.

“Oh Christ, the pie!”

He unceremoniously pulled out of me, not even diving in for the post-coital kiss and snuggle he was so fond of. He grabbed my robe from the floor and chucked it over his shoulders as he fled down the stairs. With the bedroom door open, I could hear the incessant beeping of the smoke alarm and smell the faint hint of burning. I grabbed my pants and followed John down the stairs to see him pull the charred mess from the oven while Mrs Hudson was standing on a chair, waving a tea-towel under the detector.

“Really, boys,” she started. “I’m happy that someone at this address is having a bit of rough and tumble, but does it have to be at the expense of my oven?”

John coloured and looked over at me. This was the wrong decision for him to make if he was looking for composure. He was not going to get it from me. I could feel my lips curl up in a smile and saw John’s face mirror my own.

It was a ridiculous situation. There I was in nothing more than pants, John only in my ill-fitting robe, being lectured by our landlady about our sexual habits with a floor full of smoke and a blackened pie sitting on the table.

“Seriously,” Mrs Hudson continued once the infernal beeping had ceased. “If you must make so much noise, couldn’t you at least keep it soft enough to hear my kitchen burn down? Men today, not caring who can hear them doing what. You two may as well keep a microphone in your room and blast it out to wider London, the way you go at it.”

Luckily for us we were able to wait until Mrs Hudson was halfway down the stairs to get her oven cleaner before the laughing started.

“You should have seen her face,” John said between giggles, “when I came flying down the stairs at a million miles an hour, your bloody robe flapping behind me like some sort of superhero cape.”

“Pants?”

“Of course not!” he laughed, flashing me so I could see the eyeful Mrs Hudson would have gotten. “I didn’t know she was already in our kitchen!”

We tried to reign the laughter in before she came back upstairs. But one look at the pie had us smirking yet again.

“What a disaster,” John said, poking at the pie crust, rueful smile still on his face..

“It was doomed from the start,” I told him. “Baking soda is not a direct replacement for baking powder. The sponge portion of your mother’s famous pie would have been as flat as a Frisbee.”

“Thanks for your warning when I asked you about it.”

“You didn’t deserve it. I needed you and you were ignoring me.”

“I wasn’t ignoring you, I was—“ he stopped and looked up at me, an expression in those blue eyes like he was wary of telling me. I didn’t like that after all this time he was worried of my opinion of him.

“I won’t make fun,” I promised.

John took a deep breath. “Once Dad died, Mum was finally able to do all of the things she wanted. One thing, that became tradition, was baking this pie. You see, we got a ton of apples from a neighbour, and I wanted apple cake and my sister wanted apple pie, so Mum made this,” he swept across the over-baked goods with his hand. “Stupid, I guess. Sentiment. But it was one of the happier moments in my life. I wanted to make something a tradition. Something we could do each New Years. A way of remembering her.”

“You wanted me to be part of it,” I said more than asked.

“I wish you could have met her. She was a wonderful woman.”

“Of course she was. She raised you.”

John looked at me in the way he does when I say something that surprises him, a slight widening of the eyes and parting of the lips. I reached out and gathered him in my arms.

“Although you are a rubbish cook,” I said fondly.

“So rubbish,” he agreed, sighing against my shoulder.

“Maybe we could remake it together. Surely between the two of us we can work out how to bake a cake-pie?”

John smiled and pulled my head down into a kiss, tangling his fingers in my hair while I reached a hand around his waist to pull him closer.

“Don’t you two ever give it a rest?” Mrs Hudson asked, stepping back into the flat with some oven cleaner and a scrubbing brush.

John grinned against my mouth and pulled away after one last smacking kiss.

“I better grab a shower,” he said, apologising to Mrs Hudson who was on her hands and knees in front of the oven.

For a brief moment, I had a feeling of contentment. Something I hadn’t felt for so long that it felt foreign. I may not be one for tradition, but if knowing that New Years Day comes with pie making, a grumbling landlady, and a truly memorable shag, then maybe a bit of sentiment here and there would be okay.

Provided that Moriarty wasn’t going to work out a way to defeat me. For the first time, I felt pain in the thought that he might.


End file.
